First Cause Argument… Again

Another Christian thinks he has come up with the perfect argument for proving that God exists. Surprise, it is the same argument that has been used long before Christianity even existed and has already been refuted almost as long ago. Yup, it is the First Cause Argument again.

This Christian has attempted to stump me with his reasoning on Twitter with a series of tweets laying out the only four possibilities:

1. The universe is an illusion. In other words, there is no universe and it only exists in our heads with is… in the universe? At least we both admit that this is silly.
2. The universe is eternal. We are reasonably certain that the Big Bang Theory is true and that the universe did indeed have a beginning. So the evidence does not support this possibility.
3. Nothing made the universe. This seems to me to just be the same as number 2. Maybe I am missing something here, but I can’t really see a difference between nothing creating the universe and the universe always existing.
4. Someone made the universe. That someone would obviously have to be the God of the Bible, right? Lol.
My new Christian friend can’t think of any other possibilities and has stated that if I could come up with one, I would be the first to ever do it. Challenge accepted!

5. Maybe the universe was created by someones (plural). I don’t think this likely, but it is another possibility that my Christian tweeter didn’t consider.
6. The universe was created in a multi-universe or perhaps another universe through the natural laws of wherever it was created. I do not think that the creating force behind the universe must have been an entity of intelligence or in the case of the Biblical God, an entity who isn’t very intelligent.
7. We don’t currently know how the universe was created. That’s the answer I like the best… mainly because it is honest and allows us to keep searching for the answer without resorting to making up absurdly ridiculous answers like “God did it” or “magic.”
This type of argument attempts to put atheists on the defensive when we shouldn’t be. We don’t have to claim to know all the answers to all the questions in the universe or even the question of the universe itself. We can just be humble and honest and admit we don’t know everything. I know this makes us seem so arrogant, right? I mean it isn’t like we are claiming to know with absolutely certainty based on faith alone that our deity of choice created everything just for us. Atheists don’t have to have all the answers in order to point out that the answers religion offers are 1. Not based on evidence and 2. Patently ridiculous.

This whole argument is geared toward distracting us from the obvious – the religious can’t provide any valid evidence for their ridiculous beliefs. Instead of providing evidence that their God created the universe, they are exploiting our open-mindedness and thirst for curiosity.

Right now, scientists like Lawrence Krauss and others are trying to understand the universe as it is, as it was, and as it will be. We only recently learned that the universe will come to an end at some point in the very distant future. It wasn’t all that long ago that we discovered smoking-gun evidence in favor of the Big Bang. Cosmologists have a hypothesis about the creation of the Big Bang, but we don’t yet have enough evidence to solidify that into a theory. I could be wrong about that since that isn’t my particular field of study and I might not be up-to-date on the latest in cosmology.

One thing I hate about the First Cause Argument is how quickly Christians become temporary deists in order to attack atheism. The fact is that the Bible lays out a very clear picture of how the universe began and it is not only ridiculous, but has been proven false not only by science but also by its own internal logic. How does it make sense that God created light before creating the sun and the stars? This of course is where many of the religion start to fall back to the old, ‘metaphor” excuse. Well, maybe the whole damn this was a metaphor because ancient goat-herders didn’t know squat about the universe.

Staks Rosch is a writer for the Skeptic Ink Network & Huffington Post, and is also a freelance writer for Publishers Weekly. Currently he serves as the head of the Philadelphia Coalition of Reason and is a stay-at-home dad.